Jay Cost's Slant

As the debt limit battle drags on, my mind has gone back to the two previous instances in the postwar era when a Republican Congress was forced to square off against a Democratic president. The first was in 1947-1948, when Harry Truman was pitted against the 80th Congress. The second was 1995-1996 w ..

On Monday, Jim Geraghty offered a?thought experiment?about the nascent candidacy of Jon Huntsman:[S]ome conservative bloggers [are] expressing great skepticism?about the potential presidential bid of Jon Huntsman, former governor of Utah and?soon to depart as ambassador to China. Scoff if you want, ..

This item from Reuters caught my eye:With a leading Republican candidate yet to emerge, the biggest risk to President Barack Obama's quest for a second term next year is a jobless rate that has hovered between 9 and 10 percent for months.

This story from Politico on Monday has been making the rounds:Just four months after posting historic election gains, Republicans are experiencing a reality check about 2012: President Barack Obama is going to be a lot tougher to defeat than he looked late last year.Having gone from despondency in 2 ..

In the Sunday Washington Post, Chris Cillizza asked an interesting question: "The Iowa?caucuses are 364 days away. (But who's counting?) And yet there is only one candidate - pizza magnate Herman Cain - who has gone so far as to even form an exploratory committee to begin raising money for the Repub ..

1. Who's Extreme? For decades now, we have been told that the extremism of the conservative movement is so beyond the boundaries of rational political discourse that the Grand Old Party is set to fall into a pathetic, rump minority. Not coincidentally, these warnings have corresponded to the period ..

1. Make no mistake: Obamacare is in trouble. For the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to go fully into effect, two things need to happen. First, the Democrats need to hold the presidency and the Senate in 2012.?According to Keith Hennessey, Republicans can repeal most of Obamacare via rec ..

Welcome to the return of Morning Jay! From a civic perspective, I have mixed feelings (at best) about the permanent campaign, but from a professional point of view, it's awesome! We're just three months off the last election, and already there is so much to discuss about the next one! For the time b ..

CNN apparently liked its polling results from earlier this month -- finding the president's approval at 53 percent from January 14-16 -- that it decided to go back into the field ...?a week later! They found Obama's approval at 55 percent from January 21-23. I'm not sure why another poll was called ..

Good news for the president. After nearly two years of sliding downward, his job approval numbers have ticked up a little bit. The average of major media polls in December had him clocking in with a job approval of about 45 percent. As of early January, his numbers are up to about 49 percent. The tw ..

The 112th House of Representatives, which convened for the first time last week, is in many respects a historic one. The Republican majority of 242 representatives is larger than any the party enjoyed from 1994 to 2006. Of course, the Republican Revolution of 1994 broke 40 years of Democratic contro ..

In John McCormack's interview with Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee said: "Tell me what election we lost because I gave $15,000 to Guam."No problem.

The latest edition of Newsweek says that Jon Huntsman might be interested in running for president:The moderate Republican had once been considered a rising star in the GOP and a likely 2012 contender, with David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign mastermind, even identifying Huntsman as the only Re ..

The new numbers from Gallup on congressional job approval are simply stunning. The latest reading finds that just 13 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, with a whopping 83 percent disapproving. Almost all of the decline in the last month has been among self-identified Democra ..

Liberals are�not pleased�with President Obama's tax deal with congressional Republicans. There have been multiple suggestions that he�risks a liberal revolt, and that he�could wind up like Jimmy Carter.�Matt Bai of the�New York Times�writes:President Obama’s compromise with Republica ..